Amazon.com Review
As a contributor to the Village Voice in the 1970's, Jill Johnston was the first writer to come out as a lesbian in the mass media. Her 1973 book, Lesbian Nation, was a bible for militant feminists. This collection gathers more than seventy of the wildly inventive rants, reviews and diatribes Johnston wrote during that explosive era. What comes through in these writings is Johnston's fierce and iconoclastic intelligence. Her signature style of long, run-on, rarely indented paragraphs and the uncapitalized "i" suggest the frenzy of change that took place during the 1970's Women's Movement. Johnston was working to find an appropriate shape to express the ideas inherent in radical lesbianism. These essays play with notions of pop iconography in "Lois Lane is a Lesbian", new family structures in "Lesbian Mothers Ltd.," and undoing male artistic privilege in "Zelda, Zelda, Zelda." "The Wedding" includes a description of the lesbian marriage of contemporary classical composer Pauline Oliveros. In all of these essays, Johnston claims Gertrude Stein as her intellectual and stylistic forerunner. Hopefully, this collection will spark a reevaluation and appreciation of an important lesbian theorist and writer. --Rebecca Brown
From Library Journal
This collection of Johnston writings reminds us how far American society has come with respect to gender and sexuality and how far it has to go. The 56 essays in this book reintroduce us to an original thinker who shares her mixed bag of goodies?a melange of literary criticism; articulate descriptions of coming out, gay marriage, misogyny, philogyny, and parenting; and the playful use of language. She is forthright about her language, making no apologies for its fire or its irreverence. As she states in her introduction, she became a "belated mother" to her two children in 1980, after realizing that families were being re-created, the nuclear family as we have known it was not the only alternative, and she was not a failure as a mother and as a woman. Readers will note how far-reaching Johnston's perspective was; her "radical" espousals have become part and parcel of today's rhetoric and laid the groundwork for other writers coming out in a mass-media context. Recommended for all academic libraries and especially those with large lesbian/gay and feminist collections.?Laura J. Bender, Univ. of Arizona
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
